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Comment by teddyX | Hacker News Reader

Google is the moat

Moat to what? My Google use has dropped significantly now LLMs are integrated into my IDEs. It’s not zero, but my use has dropped by more than 50%

My expectations are changing too, just this weekend I typed into google

“is Monday a public holiday in Auckland”

And their AI answered me and gave me an enthusiastic and utterly useless paragraph about how some holidays are sometimes on mondays.

I thought then, Google is DONE

I think they are only surviving on momentum, and because they are so large, they still have momentum, but in the face of automated thought accelerating innovation even an enormous amount of momentum can only carry you so far.

>And their AI answered me and gave me an enthusiastic and utterly useless paragraph about how some holidays are sometimes on mondays.

The AI summaries are almost universally wrong or incomplete in an important way for everything I've search for lately. It's honestly devaluing the site in ways that might be hard to recover from.

I think AI capabilities perception in general is being greatly damaged by the Google search AI summary. Whatever model they use is so cheap and crappy, yet I can't opt out of it or even get my eyes to skip the box... Claude or Perplexity or whatever can comfortably and concisely answer questions about Auckland holidays without hallucinating, yet the Google search AI thinks you can eat rocks and put glue on pizza, and I see people trot similar examples out all the time to prove that "AI is dumb".

> “is Monday a public holiday in Auckland”

People use search engines so differently. It would never occur to me to type anything like this into Google. I would type "New Zealand bank holidays" and expect to find a list (ideally on an official-looking website), and then judge for myself whether Monday was a holiday.

Google finds me this as the first result: https://www.govt.nz/browse/work/public-holidays-and-work/pub...

What would be the point of introducing any AI into this interaction?

I used to type "New Zealand Bank Holidays" but now my expectations have changed - my expectations of what a search engine can be has evolved because I have tools in other areas of my life that are smarter and getting better, and I expect Google to get smarter and be better. I dont want to query Google the same way as I did in 2015, because it's 2025.

The answer I want is NOT a list of public holidays, thats an intermediate. The answer I want is a single word, "Yes" or "No" that's what I want.

I can ask an LLM to refactor my codebase and then help me write a GLSL shader to display electron densitry grids and it gets it mostly right. The difficulty of getting such a complex query mostly right is WAY harder than answering my basic /basic/ question about public holidays.

Asking "Is Monday a public holiday in Auckland" is a BASIC query I expect google to be able to answer now.

I'm an engineer and have been a dev for 20 years, I know that the holiday query involves a realtime lookup of the current date and time, and possibly another query to get the holidays, so it might not be as straight forward as a forward pass through a deep net, but this is GOOGLE we are talking about, what the HELL have they been doing for the last 5 years?

The thing that really irked me about the response was that the one it gave me was SO worthless, it gave me a very bad impression about Google instantly because I thought "This thing is dumb as hell", no AI response and just a list of holidays would have been better.

>People use search engines so differently. It would never occur to me to type anything like this into Google. I would type "New Zealand bank holidays" and expect to find a list (ideally on an official-looking website), and then judge for myself whether Monday was a holiday.

I used to always use searches like that, but honestly you mostly get better results now using human language type searches because they've optimized the site to work better for those. I've hard to untrain years of search engine usage and force myself to consider how a random joe would interact with it.

Talk to it exactly like a person with your voice and no crafted search term googlese and get a correct expert answer?

Ker-ching.

I just typed “is Monday a public holiday in Auckland” into Google and the second link is full list of holidays from www.govt.nz. I don't think Google is done. I still use it and it has ~79% share on desktop. Most of the rest seem to be people who have bing as default on Windows and haven't changed it. 0.87% use Duck Duck go which is probably the highest on the list that people choose as a better search engine rather than because it came installed as default.

I'm kind of surprised Google has dominated so long but I guess it's lots of money -> hire lots of bright people -> make innovations, that keeps them up there. That may work for AI too? Dunno.

I clicked Copilot button in Bing with this search term and it said the exact answer I was looking for, in plain English:

"Yes, *Monday, January 27th* is a public holiday in Auckland. It's the *Auckland Anniversary Day*, which is celebrated on the Monday nearest to January 29th each year.

Do you have any special plans for the holiday?"

It cited 2 sources which turned out to be correct (this time).

Seems far more efficient than googling which nowadays gives you an entire first page of ads. Although I'm not sure to what extent hallucination issues have been sorted out.

Well google was two clicks and I have an ad blocker. I guess it depends what you are after - I use AI too.

MySpace was the Moat.

Yahoo was the Moat.

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